Anthony Trollope injured himself with critics of a certain class by a too frank disclosure of his methods of production: and Galt may well have done his literary reputation harm by his oft-repeated assertion that with him literature was always a secondary interest. Commerce, he would have us believe, was what came first. He never depreciates his own literary work, but he so speaks of it as to tempt others to belittle it: this was not modesty but sheer blundering. Congreve in his old age was more eager to shine in Voltaire’s eyes as a social personage than as a famous dramatist; and Galt appears to have cared more to be regarded as a statistician than as an unequalled master of fiction in his own region of it. These perversities in men of genius are not so rare as they are provoking. _The Entail_ was published in 1822, and, disregarded as it has long been, its merit was not ignored then. Gifford, Mackenzie, Lord Jeffrey, and Sir Walter Scott helped to spread its fame. In January, 1823, ‘Christopher North’ reviewed it at great length in _Blackwood_, and declared it ‘out of all sight the best thing he [Galt] has done’--_The Ayrshire Legatees_ and the _Annals of the Parish_, be it remembered, having already appeared. The Professor says that he had read ‘the work on its first publication through from beginning to end in one day’, and about a fortnight afterwards devoured ‘all the prime bits’ again. The conclusion of the whole matter, in Professor Wilson’s opinion, was that Galt had now proved himself ‘inferior only to two living writers of fictitious narratives--to him whom we need not name, and to Miss Edgeworth’.